re Journalism, Reporters as heroes in film, Blogs about Media Buyouts and Layoffs

1940 film classic His Girl Friday with dream team of Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a film which I've seen, conservatively, about four dozen times.
Info at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032599/
Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=102055&titleId=206

So, given that a story that I'm referencing below involves newspaper layoffs, guess I hardly need tell you there's a Medill angle to the story. http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/
I think there's a federal law to that effect now because of a provision inserted secretly into the financial bailout bill last week, requiring a Medill p.o.v. on any media story about newspaper layoffs.

(Local South Florida Medill grads include Evan Benn and Breanne Gilpatrick of the Herald, and Jordana Mishory of the Daily Business Review.)

Sorta like the one that requires all Florida media organizations to quote Susan McManus of USF ad nauseum. Or, in WIOD's case, twice an hour all day -as they did Tuesday.

Did you miss these recent McManus pearls of wisdom:

Undecideds could decide presidential race Florida Today, FL - Oct 5, 2008

"Obviously, they're the swing voters," University of South Florida political science professor Susan McManus said. "You've got two hurdles to jump with them ...

HIGHER SENIORITY: Older voters have clout Anderson Herald Bulletin, IN - Sep 27, 2008

“Despite the media’s focus on the youth vote, the most influential voters in the McCain-Obama

matchup are likely to have some gray hair,” said Susan McManus

So, am I wrong in saying that she has had every single demographic you can think of as the election game-changer?

McManus is the Bob Shrum of Pol. Sci profs turned analysts.
She's no Larry Sabato! !!!

See http://people.virginia.edu/~ljs/ and be sure to check out Larry J. Sabato's Crystal Ball, which features analyses of presidential elections, Senate, House and gubernatorial races: http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/

There's only one prescient political crystal ball in working order these days and Prof. Sabato has it.

Honestly, is everyone at WIOD a dopey Miami college student getting credit for those jokes they call regular newscasts? It sure seems that way. They run the same audio over and over and over...
They're positively unbearable, worse than ever.

Before you scroll down any farther, read this great blast-from-the-past from a TIME magazine cover story and guess when it was written:
"What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering.
Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world."

The answer is at the bottom of this post.

Speaking of Medill, http://www.northwestern.edu/features/snapshots/ a place that I came to know and truly appreciate when I was living, learning and loving in Evanston, hard by Lake Michigan http://www.ugadm.northwestern.edu/pan/ and becoming friends with so many of their students, faculty and administrators, here's a site full of great media blogs that you might want to consider bookmarking for future use: http://blognetwork.poynter.org/media/

(To repeat what I wrote Tuesday: I watched the Dolphins' 1985 MNF win over the undefeated Bears wearing my Dolphins cap and the Bears mauling of the Patriots in the Super Bowl at the Norris Student Union at Northwestern with my friends at Medill and Kellogg, the same place I watched the Shuttle Challenger disaster live from the very beginning on ABC-TV.)

It's worse than sad, it's tragic really that none of the South Florida-based foundations has ever thought to have the good sense to fund anything approaching either the necessity, scope or quality of Medill Reports in order to keep the myriad bureaucrats on their toes: http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/govt/aboutus.aspx

About Us
For the People…around Chicago is a project launched in the spring of 2008 by the Medill News Service to merge in depth reporting with social networking. For years, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism has reported on news and affairs through affiliations between Medill’s graduate journalism program and news organizations throughout the world. We still do that with a flourish through Medill Reports Chicago and Medill Reports Washington.
This project attempts to expand our universe, or more importantly, to create linkages beyond news organizations to groups that have a particular interest in an issue. That enables our stories to continue to be a part of the ongoing conversation about that issue. We cover stories that examine what’s working and what’s not around Chicago. We are well aware that news organizations, including Medill, tend to move on to the next issue, and then another one. Our work gets buried in the flow of continuing events, and those groups and individuals who stay with an issue can feel abandoned.

What we hope to do with this project is to become more connected with you; the network of groups and people who invest in particular issues. Any stories we cover are available to you to redistribute over the web, to republish in your newsletters or other material, to link to from your website, or to embed directly onto your site. Only one proviso; that you credit us with the stories so people know we’re involved. If you are an organization or individual or blog that cares about the issues we cover, let us know so we can link back to you to enhance the network.

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/

http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/washington/

It would be great to have Larry Lebowitz of the Herald as a field general and Gabriel at Transit Miami as his trusted aide-de-camp ready to unleash their smart, savvy eager beaver reporters at FDOT like a kamikaze squad, forcing the ever-elusive FDOT Secretary Stephanie Kopelousos to finally make a public appearance in South Florida where she's made to answer questions from actual taxpayers, not the industry/trade types, per her usual MO.

And when I think about what such a squad of eager reporters could've done to the Miami-Dade School Board years ago to ferret out the real facts on the $100K crowd that Rudy Crew sought to inoculate himself with, as well as hammer the sclerotic legion of bad teachers and cranky administrators, it literally my heart skips a beat.

By the way, after having missed it many times on Turner Classic Movies over the past 20 years, I finally caught 1952's The Captive City on TCM.

See http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=17060 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044476/
It was great to once again see the under-appreciated John Forsythe, always so good in almost everything he was in, and a former baseball broadcaster, to boot, cast here as a small-town newspaper editor trying to battle organized crime getting its tentacles into everything he holds dear about his town, and later testifying at the Kefauver Hearings.
(Always wanted to say 'get their tentacles' in a sentence.)

Afterwards, with some time left on my videotape, as I was leaving for an errand, if you can believe this, per a recent conversation of many months ago with a reporter friend, I was almost able to tape Ace in the Hole for her right afterwards.
That's the great 1951 Kirk Douglas film, him as the world-weary once-promising reporter needing a fresh start, and lucking into a great story in a New Mexico cave-in and positively milking it dry -by hook or by crook. The first time I saw it was part of a double feature with Sweet Smell of Success at an art house, probably in Chicago.

Trailer at: http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=154055&titleId=613826 Warning: It's loud at the beginning!

http://www.tcm.com/video/videoPlayer/?cid=186689&titleId=613826

http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=613826

When I got back home, the videotape had ended ten minutes before the film was over! Ugh!
I hate when that happens.

It replays on TCM at Tuesday 10/28/2008 10:00 PM , Friday 11/07/2008 2:30 PM , and Tuesday 12/09/2008 9:30 AM
Catch it if at all possible!

I still have it on another videotape somewhere, but that blew my idea of giving her a tape that had something like 3-4 really great newspaper/crime movies on them that she probably never saw in college, where she began her rise as a tough-talking, wise-cracking, crime-fighting/reporter with a nose for news at a school noted for turning out real journalists, not stenographers.

A real-life Hildy Johnson.

Finally, to reprise a story as old as crime and statistics, witness the logical result of fudging crime statistics, Baltimore-style -a murdered former councilman.

Shades of HOMICIDE: Life in The Street!

I found it while looking for results on Girls High School Field Hockey to see how my niece's excellent team, had done.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/baltimore_city/bal-md.ci.gun08oct08,0,206101.story
__________________________

Baltimore City Paper

October 8, 2008
Media Circus
Taking Things Personally Focusing On Personalities--and Their Bodies--in the Sun's New Look
by Martin L. Johnson

On Sept. 1, Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer published a column on Sarah Palin, the mercurial Republican candidate for vice president.

Published at the crescendo of the first wave of Palinmania, the column (tellingly titled "A Woman--But Why This Woman?") was highly critical of the Palin selection, which Reimer suggested was made to kowtow to special-interest groups on the right.

"I thought it was a natural topic for me," Reimer says in a phone interview. "She billed herself as a hockey mom, and I have billed myself as a soccer mom all these years. As the column clearly shows, I was very animated on the topic, personally and professionally."

But Reimer, who has been writing columns for the Sun for 16 years, wasn't ready for what happened next. The day after her column appeared, the Drudge Report, which gets close to 30 million site visits daily, linked to it as an example of media criticism of the Palin pick. Then the deluge started.

To see the rest of this story, which includes lots of info on http://www.tellzell.com/ , go to: http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16827

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Baltimore City Paper

September 2, 2008

Media Circus
Media Bias Blogs Tell the Story Behind Sun Buyouts and Changes

By Martin L. Johnson

The redesigned Baltimore Sun is more than just a pretty face. Even casual readers of the paper can't help but notice that sections have been cut and some of the paper's familiar bylines no longer appear.

But behind the scenes, journalists at the Sun and other papers owned by the Tribune Co. have launched an angry (if only online) revolt against staff layoffs, management decisions, and what they see as a wholesale dismantling of the Chicago-based company's newspapers.

To see the rest of the story, see: http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=16235

To see other great media stories like the above , go to the Media Circus archives at

http://www.citypaper.com/news/browse.asp?ColumnTitle=Media+Circus

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So my earlier question was to guess, more or less, when the following saw the light of day:

"What's interesting about the current explosion of news is that it has not been accompanied by an equivalent increase in the amount of news gathering. Over the past few years, in fact, cost cutting at the networks and many major newspapers has reduced the number of correspondents digging up stories around the country and the world."

The title featured the headline:

The News Wars

Print! Cable! The Internet!

We're being bombarded by information, gossip and commentary as never before. Is more news good news.

It's from TIME magazine of October 21, 1996